by Caro Feely
I had to find ways to cope with my new angry, violent self. I had always found winter tough and that winter was worse.
We needed to get away. I found a last-minute special for four days at a spa in Ireland that was such a deal we could make it reality. We attached it to my planned marketing trip. Perhaps it would help plaster over the ever-widening fissures in our relationship.
I took to drugs, adding organic hemp seeds to my morning muesli and to my home-made bread. Maybe it was my imagination but it helped to make me happier.
'I love Dublin and I love Saussignac. They are so much better than Paris. There are no gratte ciels (skyscrapers),' said Ellie.
'It's so friendly. It's not polluted,' said Sophia.
'Yes, for a city it's really not polluted,' said Ellie.
'And I love the sea,' said Sophia.
'And especially these moving stairs are great. You can even rest your case on the step above,' said Ellie, gazing in wonder at the magical escalator. The last time she had been on one was five years before, on a visit to Ireland when she turned four. Like our friend Thierry, we were ploucs, country bumpkins, in awe of this high-tech cityscape.
'And laser water! Mzzt, bzzt,' said Sophia, referring to the sensor-operated water in the airport washroom we had just used.
Our tour of Ireland included some work but also play. We visited the people's park market in Dún Laoghaire. I spoke at a Grow It Yourself (GIY) group meeting. Markets and GIY were becoming more popular. Dublin fit like a well-worn glove. From there we took off into wild Ireland, with its layers of sea and sky and green pastures. It felt like home. Driving from friends in County Meath down to County Cork, I watched the pastures through the car windows. Hills like a cardigan strewn with silver and lime bobbles and white-dot sheep filled the frame. A flying visit with Colm McCann, sommelier at Ballymaloe House Hotel and Ballymaloe Cookery School, was inspirational; the place buzzed with action and energy. I did a five-minute talk on Château Feely and organic and biodynamic wine to the cookery-school class then we raced on to Cork city for a talk and tasting at a chic wine bar, L'Atitude 51.
Mary Pawle, our wine importer and friend, took me on a tour to meet the people that stocked our wines. She introduced me to a pal that was doing a PhD on the food and wine in James Joyce's Ulysses and living in a funky apartment in the heart of the city. I felt a flash of envy for the freedom of her single student life.
The swans near Clonakilty sat between sea and river on beach sand tufted with grass; a rugged, beautiful scene. The seascape was everywhere. Inchydoney Spa offered us aperitifs in a luxurious lounge area with wall-to-ceiling glass windows with panoramic views of the sea. We felt like royalty.
Our apartment's expansive windows looked on to infinite wild Atlantic. I opened the doors and felt the sound of it pouring through me. Sophia, Ellie and Seán went on to the balcony, leaned out and sucked in the salty sea air and crashing waves. Ellie was in my gold bowling shoes. I had a strange sensation like I was looking into my past and my future.
Then the rain was lashing so hard we closed the doors quickly and the glass became a mass of liquid dots moving in a crazy dance. In Cork city someone had recommended an app that predicted exactly when the next shower would come and go. The rain stopped in eight minutes and the sun came out. I moved from one side of the sofa to the other to escape the glare off the sea.
'It's such a beautiful day it's a crime not to be out there,' I said.
'We're going to the lounge for the Wi-Fi and then to the spa,' said Ellie.
'OK, Papa can go with you. I want to go for a long walk,' I said.
'I didn't say I wanted to go to the spa,' said Seán.
'OK, I'll go for a quick walk and be back to catch the last half hour of the kids' session in the spa,' I said.
'Good. See you at eleven thirty so,' said Seán.
'No, midday,' I said.
They scrummaged out of the door, electronic devices in hand, on a mission to find the library lounge where the heavenly Wi-Fi was.
A tiny chocolate-brown bird perched on the balcony railing for a second then flew off. I put the washing on and prepared to go. As I picked up the keys, the bright sun that had been blinding seconds before disappeared behind a black storm cloud. The wind thrashed, the rain lashed then it snowed. I took a photo of the cars covered in snow in case it was gone by the time my family emerged from the main hotel and they didn't believe me. I tidied my suitcase into neat piles of shirts and trousers. I took the rubbish out to the bins outside, my face stinging in the freezing rain. It was still too wet. I went back inside and stared out of the window, wishing the rain away. It went. I felt a sense of power commanding the weather like that.
Then I was out of the door in my runners and rain gear. I raced along the car park and down the long set of concrete stairs, passing one soul coming back well soaked. The beach was empty. High up the dune I could see his tracks filled with white snow. I ran down the beach, singing and laughing into the wind. The blue sky was clear save for a seagull crying lonesomely. Solid sand then soft sand. I began to recognise colour coding could help me avoid sinking and tracked along the hard sections. How long until the next storm?
At the end of the strand I felt the bracing wind pick up a notch and saw a black cloud in the distance. I turned and raced back, the wind carrying me, flying and singing with the sun bright in my face and the cold darkness rolling in behind me.
Faster and faster I ran. Almost out of breath, I raced up the steps two by two and back across the car park. The first splats hit my back as I took the corner on to the concrete pavement of the apartments. I scrambled to get the key in the door and was just inside gasping as the fury hit. It was so dark I needed all the lights on even though it was nearly midday. I did a few stretches to calm down and watched the grey waves swirling under the charcoal sky. Then I grabbed my swimsuit and ran the gauntlet to the main hotel to take Sophia and Ellie to the spa.
Our holiday was so good I swore we had to take more time off. But when we returned home we were back to long days and thoughts of holidays disappeared. I went back through the emails received while I was away. I had tried to reply on my tiny phone screen while we were at the spa but I hadn't got to everything. I waded back and back and saw an email from FranceAgriMer asking for an additional document over and above those already requested as part of our application for state aid for modernising parts of our winery. It ended with: 'Sans retour de votre part en date du 27/02, votre dossier se verra automatiquement rejeté' ('Without your reply before 27/02 your file will be automatically rejected'). It was 29/02 and we had missed the deadline. I felt a cold sweat break out. The email had arrived 15 minutes after we left for our week away. It was Sunday morning, the last day of our 'holiday', and I spent it in angst.
'We must not apply for aid any more,' I said to Seán. 'I can't take the stress.'
'What?' he said. 'That would be madness. If everyone else is doing it and we don't, how can we compete?'
I called first thing on Monday and found my contact was herself away on holiday until Thursday. I asked for a colleague. She called me back the next day and within hours everything was resolved. The labyrinth of French and EU bureaucracy could not be understood. I had to be Zen about it but it was hard to do.
Despite our great holiday in Ireland, back at the grindstone Seán and I continued to drift apart, barely acknowledging each other except for action required for the business. I was short-tempered and edgy. My disrupted sleep and dreams of dying continued. The hot flushes got worse. Sometimes I felt like a fire was burning me up from the inside. It seemed there was no end to this perimenopause nightmare.
Worry about Mum Feely churned in the back of our minds. She appeared to be making progress but the chemo's side effects were terrible – at least as bad as the article I couldn't bear to finish. It was like voluntary torture but she hadn't been given any other options.
The geese passed over. There was a feeling of freedom in the cold air and blue sky.
They honked way up high, so far up they were almost invisible. Black spots set in great Vs across the sky, V upon V, upon V, upon V. They announced the change of seasons, our connection to the earth, the power of instinct. I felt the earth turning, the return of the sun.
PART 3
WATER AND LEAVES
Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.
Hippocrates
CHAPTER 10
LANGUAGE AND PHILOSOPHIC CHALLENGES
'Madame Feely?' said a voice on the phone.
'Oui.'
'Mr Vellami, Vellami méthode traditionelle.' I was surprised to receive a phone call from him; I had only ever spoken to his salesperson. Over the years we had had great success with our méthode traditionelle (MT). It was a favourite with our clients and visitors, dry and crisp with floral and green apple aromas. Each year we made about 600 bottles. Once the fermentation was finished and the wine was stable we would give it to Vellami, a service provider that did the méthode traditionelle – the fermentation in the bottle, like with champagne – for us. Each year we sold out before the next batch arrived. We were considering making double to meet the demand. I had been chasing them for weeks for the delivery of our latest batch and to talk about the next vintage.
'I am very sorry but we have lost our organic label,' he said.
'What do you mean, lost the label?' I said, feeling a stream of panic. 'Where is our wine? We really need that wine. We've been sold out for months and I've promised it to many people.'
'We have your wine, don't worry. We can deliver to you next week. But we have to label without the organic logo.'
'Why?' I said, my brain trying to grasp what he was on about. 'What happened?'
'Our processes weren't controlled enough between when we bottled organic and not organic. When we changed from one to the other there was a chance that a tiny bit of not organic got into the lot,' Vellami said.
'But is it still our specific lot? Our wine?' I said.
'Absolutely,' he said.
'So it's just an administrative issue about your changeover controls?' I said.
'Yes,' he said.
I knew that the organic certification controls had been tightened. Our bakery had stopped doing organic baguettes because they were too strict. They had to completely clean the kitchen each time they did an organic lot in case a little chemically farmed flour got in via a floured surface. It wasn't economic for them given the hours of work involved in fully cleaning down the kitchen and the volume of organic they were proposing so they stopped offering it. In our local supermarket they had stopped cutting the organic loaves because the cutting machine had to be dedicated to organic to be sure that a few crumbs of chemical bread didn't get in. There was no way they were buying another professional cutter so the organic loaves went uncut. I could see where they were coming from but on the other hand I knew that it was decreasing supply and perhaps even demand for organic. Busy people preferred pre-sliced bread and perhaps some would select non-organic as a result. It sounded like this situation was a similar case of the tightening of the process rules.
Our sparkling was the only wine that left the property before it went into a bottle and with this crisis I saw the risks involved in that. With all the rest of our wines we knew every tiny step intimately. Every process from pruning to bottling had our fingerprints on it. I could see the value in our artisan processes that kept all the steps at a human scale so we knew them personally.
'What will you do for us? Not having the organic label decreases the value of the wine. It is a serious issue,' I said.
'We won't charge you anything more for the service. We'll keep your deposit but you won't have to pay the balance,' he said.
'OK,' I said, still digesting the news and too surprised by the whole affair to negotiate.
'We will deliver next week alors,' he said.
'Yes, please deliver as quickly as possible – we really need our wine.'
I felt gutted about our wine losing its label but also pleased that organic was so carefully protected that it was a guarantee in Europe. It was reassuring in a world where the crisis of horsemeat being sold as beef was still reverberating around the nation's radio stations, a classic example of industrial food production gone wrong.
The food industry was rife with loose terms. 'Irish smoked salmon' and 'smoked Irish salmon' were totally different. The first was merely smoked in Ireland; the second was Irish salmon. Terms like 'natural', 'farm-fresh' and 'sustainable' had been hijacked by the large-scale food industry and offered no meaning whatsoever. Someone shopping for their family needed to have hours to read each label in detail and a PhD in food science to be able to decipher them. It was part of the reason why, if we did have to go food shopping, we typically bought exclusively from local organic shops. Their ethos meant that I didn't need to read every label for its fine details; I didn't have time. Economic and organic was becoming possible in France. Our local organic shop offered bulk bins of core products that were our staples. They often had local, organic, in-season fruit at a lower cost than the same chemically farmed fruit in the supermarket.
As promised, a week later we took delivery of our MT. We were relieved it tasted like ours but we would not risk another batch with them. I started researching a new MT service provider, someone who specialised in organic rather than someone who did organic as a sideline.
As a result of tighter regulations our annual bottling was even more complicated than when we started. Our labels alone had to be checked by three different parties and we had nine references.
'I'm even dreaming about the bottling,' I said to Seán as we drank our morning tea.
'I know,' he replied. 'It's déjà vu. You rolled over and said "corks, labels, capsules" in a panicked voice in the middle of the night. You did the same thing a few years ago.'
It was a premonition. My email delivered a message that the labels still weren't right – there was yet another administrative rejection by Ecocert, our organic certifier. I called our label provider back for the fifth time and explained that the new law required the mention of Agriculture France below the sign Ecocert FR-BIO-01. He sent the new label back with it above. There wasn't a lot of difference between dessus and dessous – it was in the lips, and mine had failed.
It wasn't only language that I found disconcerting. I dropped a friend at Bordeaux airport and was stuck on the ring road of Bordeaux in what felt like a giant car park. It gave me time to reflect on many things, including how grateful I was that we did not face city traffic every day. It also gave me time to listen to the radio.
There were two key topics of discussion. The first was a ceiling on rents in Paris. The French government had set band limits for rents by arrondissement or district. For me the obvious negative effect was a slow pull to the bottom; there would be no incentive to renovate or invest. When that topic was exhausted the radio host moved on to a ferry company that was about to close because it was not making any profit. A Scandinavian company had offered to purchase it but the employees had voted against the purchase. In essence they preferred that the business closed and they lost their jobs than that they were purchased and helped to become more competitive, thereby securing their jobs.
I began to feel like I was Alice in Wonderland. When I reached home after three hours of driving, having listened to more radio than was good for me, there was barely time to shower before going to Thierry and Isabelle Daulhiac, winegrower friends in Razac-de-Saussignac, for dinner.
The table was set in their cuisine d'été, their summer kitchen. It was a traditional lean-to, with Roman tiles on the roof, a stone wall at the back, with the barbecue built into the wall and a counter running to the right providing preparation surface and a small sink. Thierry was good with his hands. Along with his day job of being a vigneron, he offered tool-engineering advice to a vineyard equipment manufacturer in Germany and could turn his skills to building work too. They had recently finished a major renovation of their house, tran
sforming it into an ecological haven. In winter wood-fired heating ran under their tiled floor and the warmth was kept in by hemp insulation on the walls. They had created a large open-plan living, cooking, eating space rather than separate small rooms. The summer kitchen was a recent addition.
'We need one like this,' said Seán, admiring the set-up.
'It's true – in summer, we use it a lot. We live outside, in fact,' said Thierry. 'Especially when it's as hot as last summer.'
Isabelle arrived with aperitifs and a bottle of wine and we settled into outdoor sofas. Opposite us were two hammocks: one for lying in and one that was like a swing seat. Sophia and Ellie were attracted to them like magnets.
'Hey, girls, what about a drink?' said Isabelle. 'Coke? Fruit juice?'
'Coke,' they replied.
'Fruit juice,' I said, jumping in. I avoided sodas like the plague. They were bad for health and bad for the planet.
